Something interesting has been going on with Twitter; a problem surfaced and started spreading across the Twitterverse … tweets went missing !

Although this problem occurred before, it happened within a limited scale and people didn’t end up losing thousands upon thousands of tweets.

What if the hackers from the DDoS, from two weeks ago, left a little gift on the Twitter server? So while Twitter was busy trying to plug the security hole in their system and thriving to better protect it from another DDoS attack they overlooked a “Time Bomb” that is eating up people’s tweets and spreading throughout the system.

Not this time at least…

While that wasn’t the case this time but we still had an angry mob of tweeps demanding their pound of flesh or their tweets, and it has already been a week and Twitter hasn’t resolved the problem fully. Earlier on this year, we had a very promising service suffer a very unfortunate demise, Ma.gnolia lost its users dataand its usersalong with causing a lot of people to question their faith in the cloud and fog up their visions of a fluffy future.

Is Twitter next ? Or is it just too big to fail?

As the corporate and mainstream begin their seismic migration to cloud computing platforms we will see more and more attacks of this nature. Are we going “all in” on the wrong hand ?

So what are they (not) doing ?

As we move more of our information and our lives into the cloud, how can we guarantee that our data is provided with the proper level of protection? Usually, in the corporate world, when you get into a third party agreement with a company to provide a service one of the clauses is usually the right to audit the service and that’s how you can guarantee its quality. In this case, do we even have the right to audit a service like Twitter or Facebook or even Google? Given the fact that they are free services and you sign to their terms when you accept the EULA you play according to their rules, which might not be to your benefits!

Currently as it stands, even the biggest names in business are lousy when it comes to adopting web and security standards that aim to protect their businesses, and consequently their customer base. While major technology companies such as IBM and Cisco have established an open cloud computing manifesto to help introduce more standard security and monitoring to the Internet, major web companies such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and Amazon refused to even participate. Their attitude towards privacy seems entrenched in opposition to it, and they design accordingly because its to their benefit to establish a low bar for privacy. Look at what Facebook did by making message public by default even when you have set your profile to be otherwise.

Voice your concern!

Until the customers become aware that their privacy and security has been short handed to minimize overheads and until they start actively voicing their concerns, those companies will not shape up! As we become more dependent on those technologies the consequences of such over sights could be dire, because as it stands now: cloud computing is in the cross-hair of cyber-attackers.

It was Twitter last week, now it’s FaceBook and next week it will be another service that gets attacked and goes down. So what are the steps they are taking, or not taking, to secure our data? What will happen the next time a server is compromised and an attack blind sights them? Not being known for your reliability doesn’t help you either. So what would you do if you were the next Cyxymu?

Too many questions and sadly the situation indicates that the answers won’t be provided until it’s a little too late. Maybe we should turn the noise up a notch, so “what are you doing ?“

P.S. If you are interested in the topic of cloud computing please subscribe to our RSS feed because we will be talking about cloud computing and some of the trends and technologies that’s making it big. Thanks ahead of time.

About the author:

An Electrical and Computer Engineer who accidentally started writing and blogging. Now, he enjoys doing a little bit of everything. Bam likes to describe himself as "an enthusiast with an insatiable appetite for yummy technology". ∼ M. Bamieh

Comments and Reactions

5 responses to “Migrating To The Cloud. Are You “All In” on The Wrong Hand?”

I really enjoyed your post but I have one thing to say: Don't trust any free service online! That's a rule! I lost my tweets a week ago and there's no sign of me getting them back but no one cares and no action is being taken…

So do you think that such big names ignore such huge issue because they just dont want to spend time and money on it? or it is just that there will always be security holes that they wont be able to handle? Would a new player who focus on security in its marketing campaign win the interests and loyality of people especially at this point of time where they are being attacked over and over without real security precautions taken?

I for one love using the cloud and all the services it provides from my email at Gmail to mind mapping on Mindmeister to using Office tools of Google Docs. But is this dependency on storing all my work, thoughts and communication on the cloud wise? When I think of it objectively, from a security and confidentiality point of views, it sounds idiotic to do so, but I still do it. I think it's mainly trust and peer pressure. I mean most people trust the brand name “Google” and everyone uses Twitter and Mind mapping, so why should I be the one that has no faith.

I think the next major data loss will open this can of worms and we'll be hearing about cloud computing and cloud storage in a whole new – not so positive – perspective. Thank God this time it was just a bunch of tweets lost, and not the entire mailboxes on gmail! Just my 2 cents :)

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